Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress. Papers from a by Henning Andersen (Ed.)

This choice of papers consolidates the remark that linguistic swap in general is actualized step-by-step: any structural innovation being brought, approved, and generalized, through the years, in a single grammatical setting after one other, in a development that may be understood through connection with the markedness values and the rating of the conditioning gains. The advent to the amount and a bankruptcy by means of Henning Andersen make clear the theoretical bases for this statement, that's exemplified and mentioned in separate chapters through Kristin Bakken, Alexander Bergs and Dieter Stein, Vit Bubenik, Ulrich Busse, Marianne Mithun, Lene Schøsler, and John Charles Smith within the mild of information from the histories of Norwegian, English, Hindi, Northern Iroquoian, and Romance. a last bankruptcy by way of Michael Shapiro provides a philosophical viewpoint. The papers have been first provided in a workshop on “Actualization styles in Linguistic switch” on the XIV foreign convention on historic Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C. in 1999.

Extra resources for Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress. Papers from a Workshop Held at the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C., 14 August 1999

Example text

In many works, genres, or periods the constraints governing the prosodic and segmental features operate independently of any constraints governing grammatical or lexical ones, and vice versa. But if we tentatively adopt the hypothesis that text organization, like ritual, is governed, to some extent, by a Principle of Markedness Agreement, all we need do is recognize that literature, oral as well as written, poetry as well as prose, conforms to this principle on certain levels of structure in accordance with conventions that may be more or less culture or period specific.

Immobility, freedom vs. slavery, culture vs. nature, creativity vs. fossilized forms, harmony vs. disharmony (cf. Lotman 1970:275). The deployment of these paradigms of values moulds the composition of the plot, the interaction and development of characters, the selection of settings for the action, and the sequence of themes in the narrative structure (cf. Jakobson & Pomorska 1983:107). The coherence and verisimilitude of the world in which the fictional action occurs is largely—in 28 HENNING ANDERSEN trivial literature, entirely—a product of the orderly concatenation of such correlative values.

In comparison with the marked category I, the general meaning of the unmarked category II is limited to the absence of A-signaling [my translation; HA]" ([1932] 1971b:3; see also [1936] 1971b:29-30). )", from which one may infer that "the unmarked form represents both of the terms of the opposition in linguistic consciousness" ([1932] 1971b: 14), Jakobson tries to account for this by adding to the "signalization vs. non-signalization of A" a doubly contradictory relation allegedly implicit in all such oppositions.